Fall 2016 Volume 43 Issue 1

1 Tributes to Hilail Gildin: Timothy W. Burns, Marco Andreacchio, Javier Berzal de Dios, Ann Hartle, David Lewis Schaefer & John F. Wilson

Articles: 29 Giorgi Areshidze Does Toleration Require Religious Skepticism? An Examination of Locke’s Letters on Toleration and Essay concerning Human Understanding

57 Robert P. Kraynak Nietzsche, Tocqueville, and Maritain: On the Secularization of Religion as the Source of Modern Democracy

91 Benjamin Lorch Maimonides on Prophecy and the Moral Law 111 Christopher Scott McClure Sculpting Modernity: Machiavelli and Michelangelo’s David Book Reviews: 125 Allan Arkush The Love of God: Divine Gift, Human Gratitude, and Mutual Faithfulness in Judaism by Jon D. Levenson

129 D. N. Byrne The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence by David Bromwich

133 Christopher Colmo Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy by Aishwary Kumar

139 Alexander Duff Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy: On Original Forgetting by Richard L. Velkley

145 David Foster Two Treatises of Government by John Locke, edited, with an introduction and notes, by Lee Ward

153 Martha Rice Martini Thomas More: Why Patron of Statesmen?, edited by Travis Curtright 159 Alexander Orwin Leo Strauss and the Recovery of Medieval Political Philosophy by Joshua Parens

163 Rene Paddags Tocqueville and the Frontiers of Democracy, edited by Ewa Atanassow and Richard Boyd

169 Rene Paddags The Free Animal: Rousseau on Free Will and Human Nature by Lee MacLean

175 Jonathan W. Pidluzny Terrorism Unjustified: The Use and Misuse of Political Violence by Vicente Medina

183 Ahmed Ali Siddiqi Alfarabi: The Political Writings, Volume II, edited by Charles E. Butterworth 189 Vickie B. Sullivan Machiavelli’s Legacy: “The Prince” after Five Hundred Years, edited by Timothy Fuller

©2016 Interpretation, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of the contents may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the publisher. ISSN 0020-9635 Editor-in-Chief Timothy W. Burns, Baylor University General Editors Charles E. Butterworth • Timothy W. Burns General Editors (Late) Howard B. White (d. 1974) • Robert Horwitz (d. 1987) Seth G. Benardete (d. 2001) • Leonard Grey (d. 2009) • Hilail Gildin (d. 2015) Consulting Editors Christopher Bruell • David Lowenthal • Harvey C. Mansfield • Thomas L. Pangle • Ellis Sandoz • Kenneth W. Thompson Consulting Editors (Late) Leo Strauss (d. 1973) • Arnaldo Momigliano (d. 1987) • Michael Oakeshott (d. 1990) • John Hallowell (d. 1992) • Ernest L. Fortin (d. 2002) • Muhsin Mahdi (d. 2007) • Joseph Cropsey (d. 2012) • Harry V. Jaffa (d. 2015) International Editors Terence E. Marshall • Heinrich Meier Editors Peter Ahrensdorf • Wayne Ambler • Marco Andreacchio • Maurice Auerbach • Robert Bartlett • Fred Baumann • Eric Buzzetti • Susan Collins • Patrick Coby • Erik Dempsey • Elizabeth C’de Baca Eastman • Edward J. Erler • Maureen Feder-Marcus • Robert Goldberg • L. Joseph Hebert • Pamela K. Jensen • Hannes Kerber • Mark J. Lutz • Daniel Ian Mark • Ken Masugi • Carol L. McNamara • Will Morrisey • Amy Nendza • Charles T. Rubin • Leslie G. Rubin • Thomas Schneider • Susan Meld Shell • Geoffrey T. Sigalet • Nicholas Starr • Devin Stauffer • Bradford P. Wilson • Cameron Wybrow • Martin D. Yaffe • Catherine H. Zuckert • Michael P. Zuckert Copy Editor Les Harris Designer Sarah Teutschel Inquiries Interpretation, A Journal of Political Philosophy Department of Political Science Baylor University 1 Bear Place, 97276 Waco, TX 76798 email [email protected] Book Review: Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy 139

Richard L. Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy: On Original Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, 208 pp., $52.00.

Alexander Duff College of the Holy Cross [email protected]

Emil Fackenheim, the great twentieth-century Jewish philosopher, once remarked that the time would come when the name Martin Heidegger would be most known for having made the thought of Leo Strauss possible. Should that ever be the case, Richard Velkley’s wonderful study Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy will be reckoned partially responsible. In this work, Velkley explores the possibility that “Strauss’s reflection on the basic philosophic questions has a radicality comparable to Heidegger’s” (2). Strauss’s contribution to the revival of political theory has to some extent obscured his understanding of political philosophy as first philosophy, the designation long held by metaphysics. Treating political philosophy as first philosophy is warranted because the opinions with which philosophy begins in its quest to replace opinion with knowledge are decisively formed by the law. Because the law, in turn, is shaped by the political regime, understanding the political part of the whole was central to understanding the whole as such. Velkley brings this chief philosophic intention of Strauss’s work into clear focus by situating it in dialogical argument with the work of the man Strauss regarded as the greatest thinker of the twentieth century: Martin Heidegger. Velkley writes in part to correct an overly “political” understanding of Strauss that sees him as proceeding from intuitions circulating in com- mon sense or the cave of political life which are then distilled to express the natural law. Accompanying such an opinion of Strauss is the view that his main objection to Heidegger was the latter’s “relativism” and its corrosive

political effects. Far more frequent than his remarks condemning Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialists, Velkley notes, are Strauss’s qualified expressions of philosophic sympathy or admiration. As is appropriate to any serious discussion of these figures, Velkley’s purpose is not “an external comparison of two authors, nor is it to weigh influences” (5). Instead, to the tremendous reward of his reader, he enters into the shared matter of thinking. The arc of the book may be sketched very generally as clarifying the philosophic ground shared by Heidegger and Strauss, then describing the features of that ground which suggest their different paths of thought. Velkley appropri- ately treats Nietzsche at several points, owing to his influence on the way both Strauss and Heidegger formulated their philosophical situation. They followed Nietzsche in articulating the need for a return to the Greeks to comprehend and ameliorate our present philosophical distress. At a minimum, such a need implies a relationship of obscurity between our philosophic origins and what followed, hence Velkley’s subtitle, “on original forgetting.” Heidegger comes to understand our oblivion as grounded in the self- withdrawal and self-concealment of Being. Philosophy therefore interrogates the anguished experience of the abandonment and its remainder as a per- plexing question. The pursuit of this question, though it is always endeavored through the human, can never be properly apprehended in a merely anthropological way. Indeed, for this reason the character of political life is forever resistant to clarification. For Strauss, however, the sources of oblivion derive from the “duality of the human as both political and transpolitical” (15). What might appear as a tradition, upon inspection, is better comprehended as an ongoing quarrel or argument concerning fundamental problems. That is, the obscurity derives less from a necessary falling or failure of expression on the part of the philosopher, and more from a choice by philosophers to compose their public speech with artful discretion. Thus, in recovering the fundamental problems from the so-called philosophic tradition, Strauss sug- gests these problems have the same status as “opinion” in the Socratic sense, that is, that from which a dialectical ascent enabling the apprehension of the genuine problems as problems must be made. The extent of Strauss’s kinship with Heidegger comes through most plainly in his correspondence with several of Heidegger’s most brilliant students: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl Löwith, Jacob Klein. At numerous points, Strauss defends Heidegger’s position against their criticisms of him. That perhaps raises a question: given Strauss’s attentiveness to his own manner of writing, why do his publications present a somewhat more explicitly critical (while never simply critical) stance toward Heidegger? The remarkable discussion of Heidegger in Book Review: Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy 141

What Is Political Philosophy?, for example, mentions 1933. Surely this is not merely obfuscation or dissembling on Strauss’s part; the political critique does, however, indicate something of the surface of Strauss’s thoughts on Heidegger. The record of Strauss’s correspondence gives heft to Strauss’s statement, in a late publication that discusses Heidegger quite openly, that he is of the view that none of Heidegger’s “critics and none of his followers” has sufficiently understood him. Velkley’s book gets even more exciting the closer Strauss comes to Hei- degger, as when Strauss revisits Heidegger’s work in the 1950s and ’60s, with his reading of Heidegger’s late publications, Holzwege, Was Heißt Denken, and the Nietzsche volumes. The true force of Strauss’s remark that Hei- degger’s disinterment of the tradition required the careful inspection of its roots—that Heidegger required the reexamination of the very premises of philosophy—becomes clearer. Here is the deepest agreement between Hei- degger and Strauss, namely, the questionworthiness of the principle ex nihilo nihil fit. As referenced in one of Strauss’s letters to Löwith, Heidegger questions Plato’s reasoning on this point, which entails “the subordination of the question of Being to the question of the highest being” (55). In these letters, Strauss seems especially drawn to the later Heidegger, once Heidegger has shed some of the Youth Movement trappings—the Nazi kitsch—of his early work. In the later works, in particular the Nietzsche lectures, Strauss sees Heidegger reason through the difficult formulation that Sein needs man, i.e., the fuller elaboration of the position which is held throughout his work that “Being, not beings, exists insofar as Dasein exists” (55). The rigor and clarity of Heidegger’s exploration of this possibility led Strauss to insist—effectively rebuking a host of Heidegger’s critics, such as Günther Anders, György Lukacs, Karl Löwith, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse—that Heidegger’s articulation of the basic philosophic problems does not make things appre- ciably more obscure than they already are. It is striking how far Strauss follows Heidegger in interrogating the principle of sufficient reason, that is, that nothing exists without a cause. But the position that Strauss arrives at differs from Heidegger’s in several respects, as Velkley discusses. Strauss’s presentation of nature as a “problem” is related to the post-Heideggerian emphasis on philosophy as quest for wisdom rather than simply as the possession of wisdom, and an interpretation of the eide as only qualifiedly capturing the range of human experience and so expressing a limit on the comprehensiveness of diairesis and knowledge of kinds. However, the nub of the differences comes more clearly to sight from Strauss’s attentive focus on the problem of the human good and its complicated 142 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 43 / Issue 1 emergence in political life. Given Heidegger’s interrogation of the legitimacy of the subordination of the question of Being to the highest being—that is, to the idea of the good—can the question of the human good remain central to philosophy without thereby reducing the speculative sweep and penetration of this endeavor to something merely anthropological, that is, human all too human? Strauss’s attentive and distinctive reenactment of the Socratic turn to opinions and thereby to the hypothesis of noetic heterogeneity—that its intelligible class-character, what it is, is partly the cause of a being—must be understood in the light of this most profound question. Velkley proposes an arresting formulation of the Heideggerian analogue to Strauss’s attention to the determinate interference of politics with the inquiry into what is good. Heidegger seeks to uncover “freedom from the good.” That is, Heidegger seeks to clarify a form of human freedom prior to the determining or narrowing orientation by any being, including “the good.” Velkley’s careful, measured analysis of Heidegger’s position shows that Heidegger’s radical attempt to uncover a form of freedom prior, even, to the more superficial dis- tinction between theory and practice failed to appreciate the distinctive place of political life which would become Strauss’s focus. Heidegger was inspired to attempt to lead the German university back behind the Platonic instauration of what would be fulfilled as the metaphysics of will to power in search of the original freedom which the Platonic orientation obscured. Failing to see the moral-political phenomena clearly, Velkley concludes, Heidegger risked becoming their slave. For all the radicality of Heidegger’s questioning, Strauss nonetheless diagnoses that there is “no room for political philosophy” in his thought, that space being occupied by fate or, indeed, the gods. Perhaps the most idiosyncratic of Velkley’s themes emerges late in the book (though it is foreshadowed by the six-part parabasis in which he addresses his readers): the relationship between individuality, the hallmark of modernity, and poetry, especially ancient comedy. His exploration of this connection relates to another distinctive feature in his interpretation of Strauss more generally, which is to stress that if a philosophic position is aware of a problem, then it is conceivable in principle that it could have formulated a different response to the problem; thus, for example, despite Strauss’s general apparent preference for the ancients over the moderns, expressed sometimes in his allusion to a “cave beneath the cave,” to suggest that they quarreled implies a certain deep stratum of philosophic agreement about what is at stake and therefore a kind of dignity to the modern position. As Velkley emphasizes, Strauss claims to have reopened the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns sine ira et studio. In this extremely suggestive Book Review: Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy 143 and stimulating chapter, Velkley at times hints at his own position, which appreciates more variety in the modern philosophic positions than is usually implied by the Straussian formula. Among studies of Strauss, it is becoming commonplace to determine which of the famous tensions or quarrels that he adduced is the deepest: ancients and moderns, reason and revelation, the city and man. Velkley identifies the tension between the city and man, each representing a form of human transcendence, as expressing most precisely the nerve in Strauss’s thought. The acknowledgment of the political things as the distinctive loca- tion of a form of natural fulfillment is central to the discovery that being is heterogeneous, and therefore the further admission that the city itself, through the presentation there of what becomes comprehensible as perma- nent problems, must be transcended by philosophy. Velkley’s fruitful analysis of Strauss’s understanding of the city and man may be supplemented by noting a further way that the relation of Athens and Jerusalem in Strauss’s thought bears on his response to Heidegger. Strauss took quite seriously, as Velkley shows, Heidegger’s demonstration that the premise of philosophy in its original, Socratic sense, namely, ex nihilo nihil fit, was questionable. In exploring this problem, Strauss was led to consider anew the claims of Jerusalem. In a discussion of Heidegger’s statement of the needed encounter between West and East, Strauss referred to Jerusalem as “the East in us.” Whereas Heidegger’s thought points toward a poetic “piety of thinking,” Strauss attends to the moral demands of piety. The biblical presentation of man stresses moral character, as Strauss notes, that is, the possibility that humans as humans are responsible for their moral choices and decisions. Such responsibility requires a certain measure of freedom, including freedom from nature, no word for which, Strauss frequently remarks, exists in biblical Hebrew. The creation accounts of Genesis—famously glossed as creation ex nihilo—supply the needed buttress or prologue to the full demands of justice surveyed elsewhere in the Book. The distinctive beginning point for Strauss appears to be politics because there the moral phenomena, which depend on some freedom from strict causality and therefore exhibit the elusiveness of the whole, come fully to sight. Perhaps for this reason, the superficial difference between Heidegger and Strauss—that Strauss articulated with uncommon depth the character of tyranny and the nobility of resistance to it—captures something of the deeper differences between them.